The Vivian Maier Cache

There has been some buzz on the Internet recently with the
discovery of Vivian Maier. Vivian died earlier this year, and
recently her work of about 40,000 negatives were purchased at
auction by John Maloof who has been posting them at vivianmaier.com

The images that I’ve browsed though so far have been excellent,
and I can’t wait for more to get posted. I highly recommend going
to the blog to see
photos.

With the discovery of these negatives fresh in my mind, I can’t
help but relate back to a few ideas I wrote about earlier in the
year.

The first was Philosophy
from a tea bag where I took to heart a fortune from a
fortune cookie that said The purpose of life is to do something
that will live forever. With the discovery of Vivian’s negatives,
and the images from them being viewed by a wide audience, I can’t
help but believe that she has successfully achieved this purpose of
life. I’m already convinced that if I never get famous doing
photography during my lifetime, that I’d be cool knowing that
someone else discovered all my work postmortem and got it into the
eyes of many.

The second was my plea to future proof your photography. I
can’t imagine that if the cache was in the form punch cards, or 8”
floppies, that they would be as accessible as they are. I stick
with film for its ease of archivability. The Maier negatives, along
with the tale
of Robert Capa’s missing briefcase only helps to confirm in my
mind that I’ll be more likely to achieve the goal of doing
something that will live forever by sticking with film.

K. Praslowicz October 14, 2009, 8:25 AM

Mike Disfarmer, E.J. Bellocq and Mell Kilpatrick are also important photographers discovered only after their deaths, folks whose obscurity would’ve likely been permanent had they been shooting digital.